Posted
by
Zonk
on Tuesday April 10, 2007 @01:06PM
from the that's-a-serious-charge dept.

segafreak writes "ShackNews reports that S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:Shadow of Chernobyl may contain unlicensed assets from other commercial games such as Doom 3 and Half Life 2. Though this has yet to be confirmed by any of the developers involved, if true this would be somewhat worrying. 'Responding to inquiries made by Shacknews, id Software CEO Todd Hollshead stated: I've seen a post on a web forum that claims DOOM3 assets are used in another game, but we've been working hard on Enemy Territory: Quake Wars as well as our own internal project and have not had the time to fully investigate or otherwise verify that the claim is true. Only from what I've seen on the Web, it's concerning. However, it may turn out to be nothing.'"

It seems that Half-Life 2's normal maps and water are used. For those too lazy to read TFA.
Wouldn't it be ironical if the reason Stalker finally turned from vapourware into a real product is that they "borrowed" HL2 and D3 assets...

Boris Strugatskiy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkady_and_Boris_Str ugatsky) allows copying and reproduction of his works without royalties. He's a rare example of a writer who does not write only for money.

I've played STALKER and it's absolutely not similar to HL2 or Doom. I don't deny that they may have 'borrowed' some models (probably, it was accidental) but the game itself is absolutely NOT a rip-off from Doom/HL.

I kind of doubt it that they "borrowed" the asserts to get release ready. I would assume that they used them as placeholder early on, which is a very common thing, and then forgot to replace them in the end before release. Its not like any of the asserts is some artistic masterpiece that would be impossible to recreate in a day or two.

I would assume that they used them as placeholder early on, which is a very common thing

Why would any developer take that kind of high-risk chance? Maybe I'm missing something obvious here, but using crappy "sketch" textures would prevent this kind of huge potential legal issue *and* make it very obvious which textures still needed to be replaced before release.

Given how long Stalker was in development I kind of doubt that they had everything well planed from the beginning, normally of course you would keep foreign data very well separated from your own and only use in very early in engine prototyping to begin with, but then in all those years things might have gotten a bit wild and uncoordinated and things ended up where they didn't belong.

From the linked screenshots, the alleged borrowed assets appear to be shaders or bumpmaps and such. That is, tools for the map developer that the gamer doesn't "see" per se.
Perhaps, like sound effects, companies license the use of such "tools"? I know I've heard the same gunshot noise in 500 movies and video games, and that crazy death scream...

I know I've heard the same gunshot noise in 500 movies and video games,

There's an infamous ricochet sound that's appeared in dozens of movies. I once went to a talk by an audio guy from Lucasfilm who showed a collection of about thirty short clips from movies made over several decades, all with the same ricochet sound. It was recorded in the 1940s, used heavily during the Western movie and TV boom of the 1950s, and picked up from old Westerns in later years.

I notice this a lot. It's most noticeable if the sound is in a video game where you hear it over and over, and then on TV or in a movie. The absolute WORST has to be the "128 and central.." police radio chatter. In every police show and movie ever made. And Sim City.

There's an infamous ricochet sound that's appeared in dozens of movies.

According to one of my music/audio professors back at University, the reason for that is that it's very, very difficult to get a real ricochet to happen (I assume this is qualified by "...in a way that's safe for the shooter and audio engineer."). I seem to remember something about the people who recorded it having someone shoot thousands of rounds to get a handful of ricochets on tape.

Fire a.22 from a rifle at a shallow angle towards a 1/4" deep puddle on top of mud/dirt and you'll get the bullet whizzing about 9 times out of 10. Too steep and you'll just get a splash and the mud eats the bullet. Not really any way to be too shallow.

When the bullet hits the water at the right angle, you don't get much of a splash, but the impact destabilizes the round enough for it to start spinning rapidly.

the original filenames from the Doom 3 folders remained the same--for example, a file with the Doom-esque name "lights_impflash.dds," referring to one of the game's enemies, was visually modified in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. folder but retained the filename.

i doubt one of those media licensing companies would have referenced the Imp when creating the files. unless, perhaps, they were originally commissioned by id and its original intended use was in Doom.

Heh, ever watch 'Modern Marvels'? You'll hear it in the intro and every time they go to commercial.
Some of the Imp noises also seem really common. I remember some creature on 'Earth 2' made the same noises as the Imps, for example.

Commercial businesses provide a ton of licensable and even public domain content for developers to use. It's like stock photography but for things that game developers need like textures, bump maps, sound effects, etc.

It's also possible being that HL2 and Doom3 are highly moddable games that an individual on the STALKER team borrowed assets because they needed quick place holders but then they forgot to replace them - or it's also possible the assets they borrowed are in the public domain.

Still, I've seen this getting a lot of coverage on the web and some people even insulting the developers saying things like "only russians steal". It's quite ridiculous considering the artists clearly spent thousands of hours designing unique assets for this title. It's like harping on three or four words used in a novel that also appear somewhere else.

Even if this was flat out stealing assets from one game to use in another, it appears to me not unlike stealing a high-hat from one song to complete your song. It's such a small piece of the artists work that it seems silly to consider it a stolen asset used to get rich quick - so sue the crap out of them. What is more likely is the asset was just "the right one" and the artist used what worked best in that situation.

Still, if the files in question are actually (c) to a specific company, I still think it's unlikely they'd take much legal recourse over it. It'd be hard to prove it has caused major damages or that it's been the sole reason STALKER is making money.

oh and for reference, I understand what it's like to have your violated. my music is all over russian mp3 websites being sold and I don't see a penny. But hey it's getting out there!:D

I don't think anyone can doubt that the Stalker team created a lot of unique art. But the problem lies with creating precedents. If GDC stole some HL2/Doom3 assets, it doesn't matter if they're just some small shaders - if Valve/iD let it slide, they're basically setting a precedent.

From the linked screenshots, the alleged borrowed assets appear to be shaders or bumpmaps and such.

The du/dv and normal maps for Half-Life 2's water definitely aren't shaders - they're inputs for shaders, but don't themselves contain a single line of program code. As with Doom 3's light textures, they're definitely artwork - while the player indeed won't 'see' them as they appear in the games' datafiles, they're quite distinctive and do contribute to the original games' artistic directions.

It would be quite strange to licence such textures from third-parties. They're not photographically sourced, so no big photo libraries would carry them - and in the case of the light textures, anyone halfway competent with Photoshop could make some decent facsimiles from scratch fairly quickly. It makes sense to buy sound libraries (to save shooting guns, breaking objects and releasing monsters in a clean and tidy office) and photo references (need to find some rusty old machines, tumble-down buildings etc.) - but not 128x128 pixel blobs of light.

I suspect the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. graphics programmers were independently implementing some fairly similar engine features to Doom 3 and Source, and to test their work 'borrowed' the shader input textures from the games they were emulating. Then, through forgetfulness, miscommunication or deceit, the original placeholders got left in the game.

I can't see it as being an attempt to save time or money during development - the screenshots I've seen contain some vastly more difficult and impressive map, character and prop texturing, so their artists are definitely more than capable of knocking together some quick light textures. Maybe a programmer did the original borrowing, and nobody on the art team realised where these new textures were actually from?

Moral of the story, though - don't use other people's stuff as placeholders. You might forget!

Remember this is a Zonk story.
It is a allegation that stalker may possibly use the same assets as are used in HL2 or D3, and an assumption that they did not pay for the rights to use these (through purchasing the same developer tools, or simply paying eachother off).

Good ol Zonk, posting a story that is not just an assumption, but an assumption of an assumption.

While the Mapcore post that first made the alert was made on April 1st, I have remained skeptical mostly because of the very generic nature of the naming systems. How easily could two different companies come up with nearly identical images called "grate7" or "fanblade." I dabble in texture making a little and, for me atleast, all water normal maps turn out nearly the same, so I don't think I see the HL2 connection. We do know the developers are fans of HL2, though, as they refer to it directly in the game [gamespy.com]. I am significantly less skeptical about the Doom3 connection, however, once I noticed a certain file entitled "hellgate1"

They should have embroidered the images with a few footnotes in order to avoid prosecution under the incomprehensibly tortuous DMCA laws.A later and wilier developer should send the images backwards in time through a temporal warp, and then successfully sue id Software for infringement of the same laws.

What could have happened, judging by the images, is that both teams used the same 3rd-party procedural texture generation tool (or public domain source code) and both kept the default "seed" for the random number generator rather than plugging in a new number.

First, no, that isn't what happened. While it's possible that most of the images cited could be create procedurally, an experienced video game artist will tell you that it would take far less time to generate most of those image maps in photoshop. Tablet input is very fast, and far more intuitive than tweaking algorithms to produce base shapes, then seeding more complicated algorithms to overlay multiple varying patterns.Second, is there some organization of procedural texture trolls out there or somethin

I know I haven't been able to sleep since I heard this story! S.T.A.L.K.E.R., might have (may have, even), used some highly generic normal-mapping textures that the user doesn't really see, from other games!!! God damn that is worrying!

Think of enourmous damage that has been done to the Half Life and Doom franchise by such a thing! I was looking forward to the next Doom game, but it is all ruined for me now.

The next thing you know, people will be sampling a half second loop from other people's songs, adding other musical elements over it, and turning it into a new piece of music! And children will be encouraged to cut pictures out from magazines, and glue them on another piece of paper to create a new piece of artwork... IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS EVEN!!

Oh game developers will sample another game all the time. Thing is, the game developers that do that are modders. They usually don't charge people for their work, and always cite the sampled game developers in credits.

Wow. Way to completely miss the point of this. Imagine if you were a developer working for id, and these were your texture (which you'd spent months of your life working on) which had been "borrowed". Without giving you credit, no less.

Or, say this was an indy developer they had copied textures from. Would you still say the same thing then?

The point I'm trying to make here is that the Doom 3 engine is available, and id wants people to use it. They also need to make money to continue developing games,

This is Slashdot - there is no such thing as stealing! As long as the person you're taking the work from... erm, sharing their work from... erm, sharing *your* work *with* retains a copy of the thing you shared from them, then you have committed no ethical breach of any kind. Suggesting otherwise clearly reveals you to be a corporate stooge, homosexual communist, and lackey of the ZOMGMAFIAA!In other news, I'm just about to release my very own FPS entitled Half-Liff 2, starring Norman Freeman. He looks a li

Stock content. You don't honestly believe that every game shop has it's own team rendering water and grabbing those renders, transfering them into displacement maps and putting them on to each puddle individually, do you?There are dev-shops and kits for specifically this purpose. You buy trees and procedurals by the dozen. It's perfectly likely that both teams bought the same stock water procedurals. F.e. I bet the horses in LOTR and 300 are all from the very same rig.No news here. Move on.

There is a Hollywood Studio that specializes in digital animal rigs (dunno the name right now). They started of with a sophisticated horse rig which was their only product for quite some time (a few years I recall). A good mamal rig takes lots of experience and hundreds of hours to build and optimize. There is a market for this and studios use content like this all the time. The famous William screams are just one example. And that's not even something you'd need stock content for, 'cause it's easyly made.

I'd say that's unlikely. Doom 3 was the game to pioneer normalmapping IIRC (in development, other games were released using it between the initial announcement and the final release of Doom 3) so it's pretty unlikely that there was much stock content around before then. Also some files were pretty specific. Why does STALKER have files named imp shot or hellgate?

Pish. Whoever modded the parent Flamebait probably doesn't know that the game was in development for a long time - it was previewed, with playable code I think, then disappeared from the games industry rader for a while. At the time I thought it had done a DNF.

How completely unfair to the developers and investors of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. to be publicly accused of using code/assets from other products, but not have the accusations substantiated! Even if they're found innocent, this bad press has already done the damage.

The accusations _are_ substantiated. If you read the article, Doom 3 and Stalker contain lightmap files that have the same filenames and look identical. Looks pretty open and shut to me, particularly when some of the filenames are specific references to the creatures and objects they were used for by id.

Several years ago, a game came out about 9 months after one I'd worked on, with some of their map tiles being identical to the ones in our game. After a bit of discussion with the other company, it turned out they'd outsourced most of their art development, and all the copied tiles came from one of the art houses "best" artists. A bit of digging revealed that this guy was making a fine living, by copying graphics from other games and tweaking them. He'd done it to dozens of games before we caught him. He go

With the small exception that it actually came out a few weeks back and, with some exceptions, is a relatively polished game. True that MP isn't nearly what many had hoped (8+ coop anyone?), but that doesn't detract that despite the long development cycle... it's a real game, not vapor.

And, IMHO, it's a pretty good game at that. So, yer post is absolutely true... with the exceptions of comparisons to Daikatana and DNF. Oh and the bit about the boards... they're pretty jumping, actually.

So other than the inaccurate reference to those other two games, and the comment about the dead forums... man, you're right on!